Hospitals expected to fill gap with own isotopes
New sources of medical isotopes are springing up in Canada, smaller and simpler than the hulking NRU reactor, and created since the isotope shortage of 2009.
“The timeline is tight,” and Canada will have to import some isotopes in the short term after NRU closes, said Paul Schaffer, head of nuclear medicine at TRIUMF, Canada’s national particle physics lab.
But he said Canada is reaching the point where hospitals can make their own supplies.
Medical isotopes are short-lived radioactive materials that are injected into the body. As they travel through blood vessels, bones and organs, they create an image that a machine can read.
The unplanned NRU shutdown six years ago gave a push to the search for new ways to make technetium-99, an isotope used in a wide range of diagnostic tests. NRU was then the world’s prime source of it.
In December, the University of British Columbia and TRIUMF, Canada’s national particle physics lab, showed off one of the alternative methods that have been developed.
It’s called a cyclotron. The size of an SUV, it shoots a narrow beam of energy at molybdenum-100, a natural material, and this produces technetium-99. But the cyclotron doesn’t require a nuclear reactor; it uses electricity and magnets.
In a demonstration project in December, the cyclotron produced enough isotopes in six hours to enable about 500 scans — four times the previous record for this technology. By 2018, the quantity would be enough to meet the daily needs of all of British Columbia’s hospitals.
“We’ll be able to make completely locally grown isotopes, without any long-term radioactive waste,” Dr. François Bénard, a UBC professor and scientific director of functional imaging at the BC Cancer Agency, announced at the time.
UBC and TRIUMF called their technique “a viable alternative to the soon-to-be-retired National Research Universal Reactor.” Their partners include networks centred at Western and McMaster Universities, and the BC Cancer Agency.
Canada will have about 24 cyclotrons suitable for making these isotopes by 2018, the group said.
If testing goes well, it said, the cyclotron “would likely be dedicated to medical isotope production in B.C. — as soon as 2016.”
Major Canadian hospitals will have the ability to use their own cyclotrons on a night shift to supply all their own technetium for the next day, TRIUMF says.
“Utilizing our state-of-the-art facilities, we have demonstrated that a reliable supply of cyclotron-produced Tc-99m (technetium) for patients in the London region and across the country is now a reality,” Western University’s Michael Kovacs said in a statement last month.
When the 2009 shortage hit, governments scrambled. Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq announced $6 million in funding to find substitutes for the nuclear medicines Canada suddenly lacked.
Besides the hospital cyclotron solution, the Canadian Light Source in Saskatchewan is also expected to manufacture technetium on a commercial scale, Schaffer said.